Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer

Author:Andrew Riemer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742699165
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

The brothers, like my parents, belonged to that group of migrants who were young enough when they came to Australia to learn English with some measure of success, without, however, losing their awkwardness with Australian-born people, or the quaintness generated by their inability to adjust their open-vowelled, unaccented manner of speaking to the intricacies of Australian-English pronunciation. People like them lived, at best, a half-life; they belonged to no society, they were isolated from the world. They frequently seemed grotesque when their uncertain pronunciation, insecure grammar and very confused command of idiom led them into linguistic traps or dead-ends. Of course, they could manage to communicate up to a point; but subtlety and richness of nuance were completely beyond their capacities. They lived in a linguistic limbo. Even their native language came to be transformed in bizarre ways. Over the years all sorts of words crept into my parents’ speech for which they knew no equivalents in Hungarian. They subjected numerous English expressions—shopping centre, southerly change, septic tank, service station—to the phonological and grammatical rules of Hungarian, producing at length a private language, incomprehensible in important respects to Hungarian-speakers in other parts of the world.

The lives of these people demonstrated greater variety than the plight of those unfortunate older people who remained trapped within their homes, never daring or, indeed, showing any inclination to explore the society which had adopted them. They were waiting to die. My parents’ generation had to make a living. Some achieved this with spectacular success, eventually becoming considerable economic forces within the community, even moving on, in a few cases, to exercise a measure of political influence. They were, however, exceptional, just as the few people of that generation who managed to learn almost no English, remaining confined within their linguistic prisons, were exceptional. The majority, whatever their individual personalities, whether they achieved financial success or stability, or whether, like my parents, they found their life in Australia a constant struggle to survive economically, developed perplexing and ambivalent relationships with their new environment that frequently left them confused, driving many of them into rituals and ceremonies which were often parodies of the social structures of their former lives.

My parents learnt to communicate with some success. My father’s English was much more accurate and careful than my mother’s, but only at the cost of a slow deliberateness. He spoke in a carefully measured way, with frequent pauses that were often the cause of some embarrassment. I suspect that he translated for much of the time. By contrast, my mother’s English was chaotic, observing no known rules, haphazard, with a wild disregard for case, tense and gender. Yet it was a genuine though idiosyncratic language, capable of achieving a considerable range of tone and nuance. My father never really learnt how to communicate emotions, anger, irony or sarcasm; for that reason his English-speaking acquaintances thought of him as an amiable but somewhat dull-witted man. Few had the chance to recognise his ironic relish of the absurdity of

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